Some nights, when the wind blows from the east, Yvonne Johnstone goes to sleep to the hum of the Tarong power station. Occasionally, she finds ash from the coal-fired plant scattered among the vegetables and fruit trees of her five-acre block. “It forms a ring,” she says.
“As if it’s gone up in a cloud and then fallen”.
Johnstone doesn’t think twice about it – but what of federal opposition leader Peter Dutton’s proposal to build a nuclear reactor within cooee of her smartly painted, corrugated iron home?
Dutton and the Coalition’s proposal is to build seven nuclear power plants across Australia along with two proposed small modular reactors. The opposition wants them in Tarong and Callide in Queensland; Mount Piper and Liddell in New South Wales; Collie in Western Australia; Loy Yang in Victoria; and the former site of the Northern power station in Port Paterson, South Australia. The sites are mostly in Coalition seats.
The Queensland LNP’s leader, David Crisafulli, facing an election, has been steadfast in his defiance of Dutton’s plan for the Queensland sites. He says he would oppose them if elected at the 26 October poll and has repeatedly ruled out repealing the state’s nuclear ban under any circumstances.
But Dutton, a fellow Queenslander, has previously suggested overriding state legislation.
“When you hear nuclear, of course you start to panic,” Johnstone, a retired biscuit factory worker, says. “But I’m sure that they can’t just have something that dangerous in a suburb.
“I’m a person that buries her head in the sand, I suppose, and gets on with what I want to do”.
Suburb is a generous description for the couple of dozen acreages hacked into the Tarong forest – and not everyone here is so comfortable at the prospect of living in the shadow of a nuclear power plant. Her neighbour, Brian Collison, concisely explains why.
“Chernobyl,” he says. “You know? Big hole in the ground that no one can do anything about?”
The 65-year-old farmhand moved to his Tarong block 22 years ago, drawn to its wildlife and proximity to both bush and the corn and peanut fields he works. Collison is no greenie.
“People make me laugh, they go and buy an electric car and plug it into a power point. Well, where does the power come from?” he says, pointing in the direction of the coal plant.
And if the power station and adjacent Meandu coalmine were closed down tomorrow, he says, nearby Nanango would “turn into a ghost town”.
Still, Collison can see the energy transition occurring rapidly before his eyes, with several large-scale solar and windfarms being built in this rich agricultural region to Brisbane’s north-west. With renewables “all going ahead”, Collison says a gradual transition from coal to solar and wind is “a no-brainer”.
“So, to me, why do you want to build a monster?”
Collison does not believe Crisafulli when he says he would defy his party’s federal leader – should both be elected – and reject Dutton’s nuclear vision. On this basis alone, the farmhand will vote for Labor at Queensland’s state election this 26 October.
He will be in the minority, however, according to John Cole, a emeritus professor at the University of Southern Queensland. Cole grew up not far from here and well knows the electorate long ruled by Kingaroy peanut farmer – and Queensland’s longest-serving premier – Joh Bjelke-Petersen.
“Hell will freeze over before Kingaroy votes Labor,” Cole says.
Crisafulli, though, is brooking no distractions as he seeks to become just the second conservative leader to win a majority of seats at a Queensland election in 38 years.
“[Crisafulli] needs nuclear energy like a hole in the head,” Cole says.
For some, that small-target strategy is working.
In the village of Maidenwell, about 15km south-west of Tarong at the foothills of the Bunya Mountains, inside an old garage that has been converted to a bar, diner and gift shop, there is unease about the prospect of nuclear industry in the neighbourhood – but also some wind at its back.
Perched alone at the bar is a David “Bushie” Stewart, his long white beard flowing from under a battered felt hat and clad in a blue singlet revealing arms full of tattoos. Cracking his tinnies from behind the bar is Peter Henry. Both are retired from working in the nearby coalmine and power station; both would prefer that plants be kept online while there is coal to be dug.
Henry worries about how much water a nuclear station would need to draw and whether it would have a target on it in the event of conflict.
A young cook, Blake, chips in from the kitchen with his two cents’ worth. “I’d prefer it to be out woop woop,” he says of a nuclear plant.
“This is woop woop,” Bushie counters from the bar. “More woop woop,” Blake says.
Peter’s wife, Deborah Henry, who runs this and two other tourism-related businesses into which she has invested her life savings, is the most forthright in expressing her fears.
“Any human error and we’ll be dead, or we’ll have cancer,” she says. “And I came out here for the fresh air”.
But Crisafulli’s anti-nuclear stance has satisfied Henry. She’ll be voting LNP.
Tarong’s power station is largely hidden from view by forest, but five hours’ north up the Burnett Highway, signs point towards a scenic lookout of the open cut coalmine and coal-fired Callide power plant.
Taking in the view, dressed in blue jeans, a high viz top, her blond hair in a ponytail, is Ann Lederhose. The sales representative for a company that services the mining, oil and gas industries, she is about to drive 115km east to her home in Gladstone.
Lederhose is sympathetic to communities and families reliant on its jobs, but says coal-fired power stations are “very much a thing of the past”.
“We can’t keep digging shit out of the ground and burning it,” she says. “Or coal anyway.”
Uranium, though, is a different matter. Nuclear energy, she believes, “is the way we are going to have to go”.
Lederhose agrees too with advocates who propose a nuclear plant at Gladstone, saying it would be a “sensible solution” for the port city home to the state’s largest coal-fired power plant.
“There’s a lot of dirty industry there that puts a lot of emissions out,” she says. “So anything that they can do to clean that environment would be a massive bonus.”
Opposition to renewables is also more overt around Callide. Anti-renewable signs dot the landscape, including at the front gate of nearby farmer Darren Jensen’s property “Grandview” – a vista that includes Callide’s smoking stacks and cooling towers, just a few kilometres away.
“I’m fine with it,” Jensen says of the power station. “And I don’t have a problem with nuclear being there at all.
“You go all over Europe and all over America and there’s nuclear power stations operating safely everywhere.”
Jensen does, however, have a problem with the burgeoning solar and wind industries. As well as the loss of arable land, Jensen’s worries include the impact of high voltage towers upon land value, clearing of natural habitat and less secure jobs and more waste associated with ageing panels and turbines.
“More often than not” an LNP voter, Jensen says he may cast a protest vote for One Nation on energy.
“My personal preference is nuclear, I reckon it’s a great technology,” he says. “But why rush? Keep burning coal until we can have that technology available.”
Dr Amanda Cahill, the chief executive of the not-for-profit The Next Economy, is picking up on angst at renewable energy in the regions and says “nuclear is catching on more than some people expected”.
And she can understand why.
Cahill says the climate wars that engulfed Australian politics for at least the decade to 2022 meant many discussions around energy transition were held “behind closed doors”. So the money and projects now pouring into the renewable sector has caught some communities by surprise.
But “this whole conversation” about nuclear, Cahill says, is only adding fuel to a climate of “confusion and chaos and uncertainty”.
“And it’s making people nervous.”
